Barely two years after its release, Microsoft is pulling the plug on Halo Wars on Dec. 15, axing leaderboards and stat-tracking as well as the forums. Fans of the real-time strategy game are not pleased.

The community was informed of this on Tuesday. They were told they'd be "transitioning ... to Halo Waypoint's forums," which is a nice way of saying goodbye to the halowars.com website and to the community, because they won't be in any officially dedicated area over on Waypoint.

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More importantly, "the forums will disappear and so will online stat-tracking," the mod writes, a full 300 words into the announcement. Talk about burying the lede. "I know this will be rough on a lot of you," he says.

No kidding. Here are some comments.

Game is dead. Fuck you.

NO STAT TRACKING?? YOU JUST KILLED THIS GAME!! FUCK YOU!!!

They are cheap bastards! I'm buying this domain when they let it go lol

Possibly the most close-knit video game forum community is going to be tossed with a bunch of Reach junkies.

"This is undoubtedly part of Microsoft's efforts to wind down the Halo Wars community by making competitive ranked game play impossible and providing no way for people to view game statistics," writes Remember Ensemble Studios, a repository of materials from the game's developer (now defunct).

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It goes on to note that Halo Wars earned a Metacritic score of 82 (GameRankings: 81.92) when it released in February 2009, and its one million units sold globally in the first month of release helped make it "the best-selling console real-time strategy game to date." Granted, but that's a tiny category, and a genre that does demonstrably better on the PC.

Back at HaloWars.com, gamers were told they will get a fifth title update but "unfortunately, it won't include many of the fixes that we all wanted it to include." Sounds like that one is last call. But they will get an "exclusive forum avatar," at Halo Waypoint, so there's that.

But on Dec. 15, this thing is all over. "Enjoy the time you have here on HaloWars.com and print-screen or copy-paste any of your favorite old posts and/or game history data, since that will all be taken offline on December 15th. We won't be carrying over accounts, posts, or anything else between the two forums."